I thought that the submissions to Photo Stealers were slow due to the holidays aka the busiest time of the year for photographers. I was wrong. Turns out that Google has been marking most of my submissions from this website as spam. Sigh. I went through some of the backlog and this submission was in there. It’s a doozy. I guess it is a good thing it was filed in the spam folder because in December I wouldn’t have had the time to worry about this one. At least now I can source while weddings are importing and exporting so there’s that hidden blessing.

Nicole Rios runs My Magical Moments and it’s so magical I can’t quite even figure out if she’s in Bakersfield, California or St. Louis, Missouri. She’s got running ads for both areas so I’m putting both locations in. I’m guessing there was a recent move or maybe she’s got family in one location and visits frequently? Who knows.

This PS’er is quite prolific, quite possibly one of the most I’ve every featured on this site. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across one of my own images on her Craigslist ad. Of course it’s one of the first professional sessions I ever had and the circumstances were beyond what I was anticipating (message me for the laughable details). Why is it that people steal the images that suck the most? Anyway, there’s a lot here so let’s get to it. This one took a lot of time!!! I didn’t get through all the galleries because screen capping them was difficult and very time consuming. Note that many of the images she’s not only removed the watermark but also edited the images from their original state.

I have a feeling more are stolen in the galleries that I am not finding sources for. This photographer recently moved from the Kansas City area to Phoenix, AZ and changed names from The Photo Pros to Amorie Photography.

I am still baffled that ANOTHER photographer has taken images from porn sessions and turned them into senior portraits. WTF HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN MORE THAN ONCE!?

One question I get a lot is why is wedding images the most featured here. Partially it is because I’m a wedding photographer so that’s what I’m naturally drawn to but also these images tend to be the most stolen. Many photographers start out doing portraits but then decide they are going to “break into” weddings because they see that’s where the money is at (never you mind that weddings are more expensive because they are much harder!). Since they do not have their own portfolio to draw from for advertising, they use others. This happens in other genres too (boudoir is second runner up!) but weddings seem to be the biggest money draw is so therefore it’s the category that’s most often featured. I’m going to be doing a FAQ post soon, feel free to comment with your burning questions.

Her website appears to be clear due to the lack of wedding images but the other sites are not so clean, including her blog which I find amusing that she disabled right clicks on.

Update 04/17/2014 @ 9:00AM

The owner/husband of the owner have commented below claiming the issue was only with the ONE Craigslist ad and the images were all from free wedding image websites. I already showed images from the blog and Facebook, added images from the second Craigslist ad that included the recessional with the petals.

Note, it doesn’t matter if you are using free stock images (which all of these images are not stock imagery) it is dishonest to use these images to represent your personal body of work as a photographer, often it is also against the TOS of the stock image site.